As soon as Jayla and the Fifth Under Captain began doing more than just keeping each other warm at night, she noticed a change in the men around her. They treated her differently, less respectfully than they had before. They also treated their captain less respectfully.
She continued English lessons every day, but fewer attended. They hadn’t left their campsite since the combat, wherever it had been, and Jayla knew they would be out of food soon, yet no one did anything about it. They just complained to each other and gave her the cold shoulder.
Before, she’d been like a mascot, the kid sister they all watched out for and let hang out with them. Once she wasn’t a kid sister any longer, once she was clearly a woman, they resented her and resented the captain. She tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen.
“They want girlfriends, too,” she said to him. He grinned and shrugged.
“Let them find their own women,” he replied in his broken English.
The few who continued to attend her English classes picked up the language quickly, supplemented by training from their tablets.
Jayla also learned Malakshian.
“Captain,” one of the soldiers yelled from the combat craft one morning, interrupting English class. “Come quickly.”
Jayla understood the words and followed her captain and his men into the vehicle. A video played, in English, on one of the view screens.
It took a few moments to understand what she was watching, and the ending horrified her. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t jive with the things she had experienced with the Hrwang. But it explained so much.
“Translate,” Fifth Under Captain ordered her, and the video started again. She did her best.
The Fleet Admiral led a security force to the Admiral Commander’s quarters. He didn’t understand why the Lord Admiral had confined the man to quarters until he saw the intercepted broadcast. He wondered if the aliens knew that the Hrwang could intercept any and every broadcast and then he wondered if they had broadcast it on purpose.
Nothing in the broadcast matched what he believed. He didn’t know how much the Lord Admiral already knew about what it contained. He only knew what he had to do next.
They burst into the Admiral Commander’s quarters. The man lay on his bunk, notes and books scattered everywhere, some held by velcro to the blanket, others floating in the room.
The Fleet Admiral’s Adjutant read from his tablet.
“You are hereby arrested and designated Prisoner Zero Six One Six. Do you wish to have your duties explained to you?”
The Admiral Commander looked up at the Fleet Admiral’s Adjutant, then at the Fleet Admiral himself. He had been surprised, more like startled, by the intrusion, but not surprised by his arrest. He almost looked as if he had been expecting it at any time. He waved the Adjutant off.
“Your new location will be the brig, awaiting trial,” the Adjutant explained.
“I understand,” Prisoner Zero Six One Six replied. “Just, please, could you have someone organize these things and store them away for me?”
If he had been a man of lesser rank, the Fleet Admiral would have scoffed at the request. Instead he nodded and his Adjutant gave orders to the security force. The prisoner followed them out peacefully.
Three rapid pings sounded on the tablet of the Lord Admiral’s Adjutant. He immediately began running at the warning, not taking anything with him. In the corridors, he took advantage of the weightlessness, flying down them headfirst, his hands pulling himself along the rails on either side, startled crew moving out of his way.
By the time the Fleet Admiral and the security team reached his quarters, the Lord Admiral’s Adjutant was in an emergency escape pod designed for thirty people, overriding safeguards with special codes. He’d end up in some random location on the alien planet below, but he’d be under the protection of the Lord Admiral where no one could torture him for his secrets.
He was not only saving his own skin but saving his commander’s skin as well.
John Cathey pondered the video they’d seen. It had been broadcast repeatedly, probably from an antiquated television station, and everyone in the UN building talked about it.
It changed nothing for him. He’d always known who the enemy was.
But when the platoon he was temporarily a part of foraged for food, the enemy they guarded against were not alien, but human.
They couldn’t forage in anything less than platoon strength, although the fifty soldiers with him probably had less than a couple of thousand rounds of ammunition between them.
John told everyone to treat him like another foot soldier. Squad leaders still commanded their squads and the platoon leader still commanded his platoon. He’d been warned about the man, been warned about his trustworthiness despite his having been an NYPD Chief over some random department John couldn’t recall.
John had to see for himself.
They followed FDR avenue, squads moving ahead to each intersection to make sure they were clear before the rest of the platoon crossed. They turned at Bellevue, the hospital had already been picked over, and headed west on 26th. The Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory lay ahead a few blocks. He chuckled at himself inwardly, remembering when he’d pointed it out on a map and, being a non-New Yorker, had recommended they hit it for weapons. The New Yorkers had laughed and explained the building existed as a national historic site. No weapons were there.
They turned on First Avenue, heading for the College of Dentistry. Maybe some medicine remained.
They’d been finding less and less with each expedition.
New York City had problems. Big problems.
The aliens hadn’t killed that many residents. Only a few meteors had struck the city itself, targeting government buildings. The infrastructure leading into the city had been devastated though, and without a constant source of food coming in, there just wasn’t enough to go around.
Many on the outskirts had already fled.
The inner circle of decision makers at the UN Headquarters devolved into titanic arguments when discussing what to do next. John’s Three Judges all agreed they needed to leave, but some of the platoon commanders and squad leaders disagreed, saying they could fight it out on territory they knew, rather than fighting it out on territory they didn’t know. The Mormon bishop who was one of the Three Judges made impassioned pleas to take the people to Zion, to Utah, but had no defense when confronted with the dangers such a trip would impose.
“We can’t even go north of 96th. How are we supposed to walk across the whole country?”
“Pioneers did it all the time, before.”
“Two hundred and fifty years ago. The natives they encountered back then weren’t carrying machine guns or riding in tanks.”
A tank had rolled passed the UN headquarters one night, terrifying everyone. John didn’t know what purpose the crew of the tank had, but they kept going and everyone left them alone.
The arguments continued, and reports of treachery and untrustworthiness increased, sometimes leaving John not knowing whom he could trust. When many accusations surfaced about one of his platoon commanders, a man the City of New York had placed great trust in, he consulted with his Three Judges.
“Go see for yourself,” the Presbyterian minister suggested.
The others had seconded the idea and John now found himself armed with an ancient, bolt action rifle with six bullets, standing in front of the College of Dentistry.
The ambush hit when half of the platoon were in the building and the other half still outside, one squad in covering defense, the rest more or less lined up against the wall. The platoon commander had been with the covering squad, John lined up with the last squad supposed to enter the building, watching warily around him, but trusting his men.
The covering squad vanished, melting away into the buildings.
The attackers came from two directions and John and the others trapped outside hid
in small alcoves along the side of the building. Four lay dead in the street after the first round of firing and if the alcoves hadn’t been there, they all would have been dead.
Whoever had suspected the platoon commander had been right, and despite his credentials, the man was a traitor. He must have stacked the squad assigned to covering duty with his friends, or at least those who agreed with him, and they disappeared at a prearranged moment to head off and collect their thirty pieces of silver while the two groups of ambushers attacked.
John did a quick head count as bullets whizzed by in both directions.
About twenty-five had entered the building, eleven had deserted, and four lay dead in the street, leaving John and nine or ten others hiding in the alcoves. There’d been at least four alcoves. There were three people in his, himself, a girl with a pistol, and a wounded man with an AK-47.
“How much ammo you got?” John whispered to the healthy girl tending the man.
“I don’t know,” she said. She cried over the man whose jacket was stained with blood. The stain grew larger.
John had never felt more alone, even spending all those days in the apartment building staking out the UN Headquarters.
The angle of the bullets raining in on them changed, the attackers moving to the other side of the street and coming closer. There wasn’t much he could do. The ten or so of them would be killed, then the rest of his platoon would be trapped in the building. The situation seemed hopeless. John had never trained for anything like this. He thought about the ending of For Whom the Bell Tolls and how the main character, he couldn’t remember his name, the American, was trapped in an ambush like this, in which death was going to be the only outcome, was always going to be the only outcome.
The aliens are the enemy, people, he wanted to yell at his attackers. The aliens are the enemy, he wanted to yell at the former police chief, now former platoon commander, now traitor. The aliens are the enemy, he wanted to cry to the entire city, to the entire world.
How come no one seemed to get it but him?
The aliens are the enemy.
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